But Reddit’s growth didn’t just come from the site’s typical role as a news aggregator. Reddit’s sub-communities, which focus on a specific topic or theme, have become increasingly popular as well.

It seems Reddit isn’t necessarily just about bringing news to its community members any more. That function is still a very large part of the site, as posts about the protests in Egypt and Canada’s looming metered Internet billing littered the front page over the weekend. But the Reddit crew has seen a lot of success outside the website as well — they launched a successful “Secret Santa” campaign that included 17,000 Reddit users from 90 countries exchanging gifts. Most cities have their own active Reddit communities as well.

Those are pretty good numbers for a site that was seen second to news aggregator Digg for a long time. That was until Digg decided to remake the site and kill a number of features, leading to a mass exodus. Quantcast, a traffic research company, indicates that Digg now has 8.2 million unique visitors, down from nearly 16 million unique visitors in August before the latest version of Digg was released. Reddit boasts nearly 14 million unique visitors, according to the numbers it released today.

Reddit has about 10 employees working from San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. It was founded by Alexis Ohanian, who sold the service to Condé Nast and went on to work with travel site Hipmunk (a favorite of VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha).